Fanfare for the Common Man

I wrote a book. It only took me 35 years to finish one. That’s not too bad.I realized I was good at starting novels. Coming up with the plot, characters, internal conflict – a book is nothing without some internal conflict – and the first 10 or so pages as a teaser was something I was really good at. Finishing them is where I had the problems.I was stuck on the premise a real book had to be somewhere in the ballpark of 120,000 words and about 425 pages in length. Anything shorter in my mind wasn’t a real book.Your books should be no longer than 70,000 words, said my writer friend Eric Jerome Dickey. He’d written almost two dozen of these novel things.I thought: 70,000 words? I’m just getting started.The novel I’d been writing at the time, LOOT, pegged in at a little more than 146,000 words.“You wrote the phone book,” Eric said. “That’s Stephen King territory.”I thought he was crazy, until he said, “You’re thinking in 8.5x11 terms. Don’t do that. Book pages, hardback and trade paperbacks, are only 6x9 inches in size.”So, I did the math on the second book I’d been working on, a love story called “The Lunch Box.” It topped out at a little more than 101,000 words. When converted to trade paperback’s 6x9-inch format, it topped out at 509 pages.No wonder I could never finish these things. I really was writing the phone book.Eric said there was no better time for un-agented writers to pen a novel than now. I’d been holding out for the phone call offering the six-figure book deal. Ronda Rich, a former colleague, had walked into a writer’s convention in Atlanta wearing a short skirt and stilettos and inked herself a six-figure book deal. I figure if she could do it so could I – the book deal, not the short skirt and stilettos. I wear a size 14 shoe. I don’t think they make stilettos that big.I’d seen the horror stories of self-pubbing first hand.I remember one of my first book interviews was with a 20-year old young man who had written a history on the Civil War on South Carolina. I remember meeting him at the used bookstore on Main Street here in town as he was preparing for a book signing and release party on his book.We sat down to talk and I started flipping through the first few pages of his book.On page 9, I found a typo.A bad one.I showed him.And I watched his shoulders sag in defeat.“I just bought 500 copies of this stupid thing and there’s a typo?” he cried. “Don’t they edit these things?”Apparently not.I watched him leave the bookstore pulling his 500 books behind him in a Red Rider wagon. I never saw him again.So I have a book, a romance novel, and it’s called Locked Hearts. Not something you would expect out of me, but I wrote it.I’ve got a dozen more, all romances, and another dozen after that in other genres. I held my first book in my hands and I liked the heft and feel of it.In my life I have pitched in front of 10,000 screaming baseball fans and played in a real-live rock band.Nothing compares to this, seeing your name above the title. Nothing at all.

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